Floyd Bennett Field Journal; Flying With the Greatest of Ease While Grounded

By DAVID GONZALEZ

Published: July 22, 1991

A dizzying, careening ride with a fighter pilot in Italy in World War II cured Harry Botkowsky of his urge to fly small planes. These days the 72-year-old Brooklynite limits his air time to really small planes -- radio-controlled models that arc and buzz above Floyd Bennett Field.

"I've had plenty of opportunities to go up with friends who have planes, but I say no thank you," Mr. Botkowsky said. "I'd rather do my flying by myself and on the ground."

Though the full-sized planes that graced the onetime naval air station have gone the way of the Dodgers, Mr. Botkowsky and the members of the Pennsylvania Avenue Radio Control Society are bent on continuing their own aviation traditions. Many are middle-aged and retired hobbyists whose adult incomes nurture youthful passions for planes that now cost several hundred dollars or more.

Every day, along a sun-baked taxiway where seagulls dare -- but only at their own risk -- several dozen men wait their turn to stride up to the flight line and guide their planes through figure-eights, dips, loops and screaming runs.

Such displays of daring are not alien to Floyd Bennett Field, a vast expanse of marshes, campgrounds and abandoned runways on Jamaica Bay at Brooklyn's southern tip. In its heyday, the field was the designated eastern airstrip for measuring coast-to-coast record flights.

When the field was turned over to the National Park Service in 1971, model airplane enthusiasts, smitten by its runways and historic status, flocked there after years of using the parking lot of Riis Park and other local fields. Coast Guard and Police Department helicopters are the only full-sized aircraft at the field.

The club began in the hobby's old days, when youngsters who flew rubber-band-powered models graduated to gas-powered free-flight planes. They flew them above lots by the junkyards along Pensylvania Avenue where Starrett City stands today. The planes, launched by hand, would soar for several seconds until they ran out of fuel and slowly spiraled to earth.

"It was something mystic," Mr. Botkowsky recalled of the early flights.

Old-timers like Harold Kornstein, a hobbyist for more than half a century, are sought after by hobbyists eager to tap his brain. He laments that he could not pass on his love of flying models to his two sons, now grown. "I didn't want to push it," he said somewhat wistfully. "They might have been interested in this if the slot cars hadn't come along."

The earliest radio planes were crude and unpredictable contraptions that would vanish over rooftops or plunge into the water when the transmitter batteries sputtered. Transistors, microchips and new materials have produced more reliable and maneuverable planes with retractable landing gear, fully functioning flaps and rudders and engines that power a plane for 15 minutes.

Demanding knowledge of electronics, aerodynamics and esthetics, some of the planes are built from scratch with painstaking detail over months or years. Some of the hobbyists who have gone "full scale" -- flying real planes -- swear the model planes require greater skill because pilots cannot rely on visual and physical cues. They boast how commercial pilots have strutted boastfully onto the field and walked away vexed and unable to get the models airborne.

"If you tell somebody you fly a model airplane they think of toys," said Seth Sterling, a 46-year-old science teacher. "But during the Six Day War, Israel used planes not much different than these to smoke out missile batteries and destroy them."

Angelo Lanci has his own mission. He and four other men have been laying the groundwork for what they say will be a model-aviation first. Sometime next month they plan to fly a modified plane off a Brooklyn pier, handing off control to another pilot in one of two boats who will then navigate the plane once around Manhattan -- all on one tankful of fuel.

Mr. Lanci and his co-pilot, Tony Cerasani, have been conducting flight tests and making final adjustments, trying not to tip off the field's other pilots. "We sort of kept it secret," said Mr. Lanci "If word gets out, they might try to do an end run on us."

Competition is less important for others, who go to the field to schmooze with old friends, kibitz with the newcomers and get a little "stick time" on the radio controls.

"It's a nice way to get away from home and work," said Marvin Omanoff, a 62-year old garment buyer. "It's exercise where I don't have to run around."

Photo: Angelo Lanci, left, and his co-pilot, Tony Cerasani, shown making adjustments on one of their model planes, are planning an aviation first. Next month they will fly a modified plane off a Brooklyn pier, handing control to another pilot in one of two boats, who will then fly the plane around Manhattan. (Dith Pran/The New York Times) Map of Brooklyn indicating Floyd Bennett Field.